50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  As irrational beliefs go, this is not one of the more dangerous ones. Believing that a sixteenth-century astrologer accurately saw the distant future is, however, a symptom of a greater problem that is risky indeed. Where one irrational belief creeps in, others may follow. People in a democracy, for example, who can't recognize the utter emptiness and failure of Nostradamus claims are probably at greater risk of being fooled by corrupt politicians, dishonest marketing efforts, and bogus medical treatments. I think it's important to confront irrational beliefs, both superficial and serious. One doesn't have to be rude or overly aggressive about it, of course, but we shouldn't silently accept any of them in a society that places any value on reason.

  James Randi certainly never surrendered to nonsense, but he does seem resigned to accept the enduring popularity of the great seer of France. “The legend of Nostradamus, silly as it is, will survive us all,” he writes. “Not because of its worth but because of its seductive attraction, the idea that the Prophet of Salon could see into the future will persist. An ever-abundant number of interpreters will pop up to renew the shabby exterior of his image, and that gloss will serve to entice more unwary fans into acceptance of the false predictions that have enthralled millions in the centuries since his death. Shameless rationalizations will be made, ugly facts will be ignored, and common sense will continue to be submerged in enthusiasm.”7

  Unfortunately, that's one prediction I can believe.

  GO DEEPER…

  Randi, James. The Mask of Nostradamus. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.

  The supernatural is a failure of human imagination and an insult to the majesty of the real.

  —Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian

  It is likely that unlikely things should happen.

  —Aristotle

  On August 5, 2010, a cave-in trapped thirty-three Chilean miners more than two thousand feet deep in the earth. Many observers assumed that death was likely, if not certain, for the men. However, after a $20 million, sixty-nine-day, round-the-clock rescue effort, all of them were saved. An estimated one billion people watched as the men were pulled up, one by one, in a slim metal cylinder. It was not surprising, of course, that the word miracle was immediately attached to the event and repeated often whenever people spoke about the rescue. Was it a miracle? That depends on how miracles are defined.

  Traditionally a miracle has been, for most people, an unusual event that seems to violate or transcend the normal workings of the natural world. Most people who believe in these kinds of miracles link them to their religion's specific god or gods. They never seem to credit the god or gods of a rival religion. In this way, miracles are seen as verification of one religion or another, determined by who is claiming the miracle. But it's even more complicated these days because in common, everyday speech, people toss the word miracle around without much thought. The bar has never been lower. A late comeback by a sports team is sure to be called a miracle. A winning hand in black jack might qualify too. By that standard, I believe in miracles. Every time my son eats all his vegetables at dinner, for example, I feel that I have witnessed a profound miracle. But do I believe in the kind of miracles that are supposed to contradict the laws of nature? No, and here's why.

  Miracles that cannot be explained as naturally occurring events depend on ignorance. I don't mean “ignorance” in a mean-spirited or condescending way. Let's take myself as an example. There are so many things I don't know about the universe that it would be ludicrous for me to witness something that I can't explain and, because it stumps me, declare that it must be a magical or miraculous event. Wouldn't it be far more likely that I simply don't know enough to explain what is going on by natural means? The only sensible and honest way to react to something you do not understand is to admit that you do not understand it. Filling in a blank with a made-up answer is intellectually shallow and dishonest. It seems to me that we all would do better to simply admit that many so-called supernatural miracles are mysteries. Sometimes things happen that we cannot explain. Of course some people can't stand to leave loose strings dangling so they pretend to know by saying it was the act of a god. I suggest we embrace the phrase, “I don't know.” It seems to get a bad rap, but “I don't know” is a respectable answer when one doesn't know.

  My travels and encounters with diverse cultures taught me an important thing about miracles. I learned that the less people know about basic science, the more they talk about miracles. In places where there is little awareness of astronomy and medical science, for example, one hears much talk of miracle eclipses and healings from minor illnesses and injuries that most people recover from. In societies with higher levels of science literacy, I still heard claims of miracles, but it was less frequent and almost always limited to unusual events, such as people surviving a plane crash or the rescue of some lost hiker. The correlation is clear: more understanding of the natural world means less reliance on miracles to explain events. This can be seen in history as well. Centuries ago, things we now understand were thought to be unexplainable and therefore supernatural. It is likely that this trend will hold true in the future. Today's miraculous occurrence will probably be tomorrow's routine occurrence, thanks to future generations' greater understanding of how the universe works.

  A 2009 Harris Poll found that 76 percent of Americans believe in miracles.1 I think they believe for three primary reasons. The first is that miracles are closely associated with religious belief. Claims of miracles are abundant and important within Christianity, and most Americans are Christians. Therefore, it should be expected that most Americans would be heavily predisposed to believe in miracles.

  The second reason so many believe in miracles is that few people ever slow down and think critically about miracles. Even a tiny bit of skeptical thinking can easily bring the concept of miracles down to Earth. Just because an event is rare, conveniently timed, or can't readily be explained is no justification to jump to the conclusion that there must be something supernatural going on. Many miracles are almost certainly nothing more than random events and coincidences that must occur in a busy world filled with seven billion people.

  The third reason miracle belief is reported by so many people is that referring to unusual (but clearly nonmagical) events as miraculous has become entrenched in our culture. To say the Chilean miners were saved by a miracle in the supernatural sense is clearly not a fair assessment of what really happened—unless one somehow defines a miracle as the efforts of hundreds of rescue workers, many tons of heavy machinery, sixty-nine days of intense and nonstop hard work, and $20 million spent. The loose way in which the word miracle is applied to almost any event makes believing in miracles a default position for many people.

  Let's analyze events that seem too unlikely to happen naturally and for this reason alone are often called miracles. Imagine an unusual occurrence that is so rare it only happens to one person out of one million in the entire world during an entire twenty-four-hour period. Most people would agree that hitting one-in-a-million odds is special, many would even say miraculous. But wait, there are approximately seven billion people alive on Earth today. This means that our one-in-a-million event would happen seven thousand times per day! That's 2,555,000 times per year. Even a once-in-a-billion event would still happen seven times every day. Suddenly long shots don't seem quite so miraculous, do they? It's a numbers game; if something can happen, it will happen at some appropriate rate. Thinking in realistic ways about statistics and probabilities does not come naturally to us. This is how casinos are able to drain billions of dollars from their customers year after year.

  British mathematician John Littlewood had some fun by crunching some numbers to show just how common “miracles” can be. He proposed that a typical person experiences one thing per second while awake, say twelve hours per day. These “things” experienced would include everything from driving a car to looking at a table to feeling an itch on your toe. According to Littlewood, it adds up to more than one mill
ion experiences every thirty-five days. This means every person on Earth should experience those rare, one-in-a-million “miracle” events roughly once every month.2

  There also is something called the “gambler's fallacy” that leads most of us to miscalculate the chances of a particular thing happening. For example, imagine if you flipped a coin five times and got heads every time. Would the odds favor tails coming up on the next flip? Many people would say yes, but the correct answer is no. The odds would still be even at fifty-fifty because all the flips before have nothing to do with the next flip. Coins do not have an internal memory system that is linked to a guidance control mechanism that allows them to adjust their landing positions based on previous flips. Las Vegas was built with money from people who didn't understand this.

  It can be a challenge, but when faced with something that feels like it could not possibly have been a coincidence, try to think of the big picture. If the dream you had last night perfectly predicted something unusual that actually happened today, put it in proper context. How many dreams have you had in your lifetime that failed to predict events accurately? You also have to think of all the other people on Earth who had a dream last night that didn't come true. The odds are that somebody's dream would hit the mark just by chance. It's like the lottery: the odds of winning may be low, but somebody does win. So, if billions of people are having dreams every night, shouldn't it be expected that some of them will “come true” just by chance? If millions of people buy lottery tickets, don't we expect that someone out of the crowd will pick the winning numbers? If we want to think clearly, we have to accept the fact that coincidences happen all the time. In isolation, many of them can seem eerie and supernatural. Placed into proper context, however, they usually seem inevitable more than anything else. If enough things are going on all the time—like seven billion people scurrying about on this planet—then unusual and unexpected coincidences will occur. They have to occur. I've had several weird things happen over the course of my lifetime, but I don't think magic or gods were involved. I once ran into an acquaintance from the Cayman Islands on a sidewalk in New York City where both of us just happened to be visiting at the same time. What are the odds of running into each other in a city that big? Even weirder, I ran into the same guy on a crowded day at Disney World while on vacation the following year. The longer you live, the more weird things should happen to you—must happen to you. If I went my whole life without experiencing a few unusual and unexpected events, then I would have reason to be suspicious that something very strange is going on in the universe.

  The primary reason people have long believed in miracles is that sometimes things happen that people can't explain. By this reasoning, the unknown is defined as a miracle. But that makes no sense because our ignorance is not proof of anything. It's unreasonable to expect that we can explain everything. We are a young species, and it was only very recently that we started using the scientific method to figure out the world and universe around us. We have come far, but there is still a long way to go. It's laughable to imagine that we should have an answer for everything that happens, so anything we can't readily figure out must be supernatural. What if an uneducated person from the year 900 somehow visited our time, sat down in front of a laptop with voice-recognition technology, and started asking random questions to Google. What if she were filmed and then shown the footage of herself on TV? What if this visitor from the Middle Ages were given a cell phone and talked to someone on the other side of the world? It likely would be very difficult to convince her that she was seeing anything other than magic and miracles. We know, given our location in history, that none of those experiences are supernatural. But she would not know this immediately, and her first temptation likely would be to call them miracles. Many people today do the same thing when confronted with the unknown.

  Regardless of what you may have been led to believe, it's OK to say, “I don't know” when faced with a genuine mystery. Ignorance should be embraced openly as motivation to learn and discover. When we come up short and don't have answers for something, admitting ignorance while continuing to seek answers is far more productive than pretending to know. It's also honest.

  GO DEEPER…

  Gardner, Martin. Did Adam and Eve Have Navels: Debunking Pseudoscience. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

  Gardner, Martin. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.

  Nickell, Joe. Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions & Healing Cures. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999.

  Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo. Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds. New York: Wiley, 1996.

  I agree with Neil Armstrong, who gave one of the best responses to the ridiculous Moon-hoax claims when he said, “It would have been harder to fake it than to do it.”

  —Andrew Chaikin

  Have you ever looked up at the full Moon on a clear night and wondered how people ever managed to walk on that thing? At first glance it almost seems impossible, doesn't it? Well, maybe it was impossible back in the 1960s and 1970s, and nobody has walked on it. That's what some people believe. They say it was all a big hoax designed to show up the Soviet Union during the Cold War. America's political and military face-off with the Russians was high stakes, with the fate of the world possibly hanging in the balance. Therefore, it can be argued, it's not completely crazy to suggest that NASA and the US government might have faked the Apollo success in order to win a public relations battle and take the “Red menace” down a peg or two in the eyes of the world.

  A journey to the Moon and back with twentieth-century technology was no easy feat by any stretch of the imagination, and no one should ever underestimate the ability of politicians and generals to lie and bamboozle the public. However, charges of a Moon-landing-hoax conspiracy are preposterous. In my experience, most of those who were personally involved or well educated about NASA's effort to reach the Moon find it difficult to take Moon-landing-hoax believers seriously. But while the believers may come across as comical in their denial of what was one of the most thoroughly documented events of all time, laughing at them or dismissing their claims without comment may not be the best reaction. They have reasons for not believing, and those reasons can and should be dealt with. So let's investigate this amazing claim that history's greatest technological achievement never happened.

  THE WORLD'S GREATEST LIARS?

  Neil Armstrong may have better name recognition, but my pick for the all-time greatest spaceman is John Young. His résumé reads like the history of human space exploration: US Navy fighter pilot, test pilot, two Project Gemini missions in Earth orbit, two Apollo missions to the Moon (commander of the Apollo 16 mission), two space shuttle missions (commander of the first-ever space shuttle flight), and decades of service to NASA down on the ground, where he has worked on everything from the challenges of living in space long-term to the threat supervolcanoes pose to life on Earth. His most spectacular achievement came when he commanded the 1972 Apollo 16 voyage to the Moon. Young spent approximately three days on the lunar surface, exploring, collecting rocks, and conducting experiments.

  Or did he?

  Was the Apollo program just another case of The Man sticking it to the naïve peasants and making fools out of all of us? It is not difficult to imagine evil conspiracies lurking in the shadows during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Moon landings took place. None other than “Tricky Dick” himself, Richard Nixon, was president. The American social scene during this period certainly was chaotic and disturbing. There was the Vietnam War, race riots, the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, horrific pollution, the constant threat of nuclear war, disco music, and so on. But faked Moon landings? I don't think so. To go from Watergate to Moongate is a huge leap, one so enormous that it should not be taken seriously without very good evidence to back it up. And this, no surprise, is the key problem hoax believers have. There is no evidence to support the claim. Al
l they have are baseless accusations and a series of questions that intrigue people who don't know much about the Moon landings.

  THEY LOOKED ME IN THE EYE

  I have been fortunate in my career as a writer to have met and written about many key people from NASA's glory days when it successfully pulled off the greatest adventure in all of human history. Here's is a partial list of my close encounters:

  Scott Carpenter (Mercury Seven astronaut)

  Tom Stafford (Apollo 10 commander)

  Frank Borman (Apollo 8 commander)

  Rusty Sweickart (Apollo 9)

  Jim McDivitt (Apollo 9)

  Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11)

  Alan Bean (Apollo 12)

  Gene Cernan (Apollo 10, Apollo 17 commander)

  Dave Scott (Apollo 9, Apollo 15)

  John Young (Apollo 10, Apollo 16 commander)

  Charlie Duke (Apollo 16)

  Gene Kranz (Mission Control Center flight director)

  James O'Kane (Apollo spacesuit engineer)

  Jack Cherne (lunar module engineer)

  Walter Jacobi (engineer, member of Wernher von Braun's rocket team)

  After many hours of both formal interviews and casual conversations with these men, I never once felt a hint of suspicion that any one of them was lying to me. Keep in mind that I'm the sort of guy who clings to skepticism like it's a life raft at sea. My baloney detector is always switched on. If I picked up on the slightest hint that even one of these men was pushing a made-up story, I would jump all over it. But their detailed memories of the space program and, specifically, the recollections of those who walked on the Moon were absolutely convincing to me. I have looked into their eyes and asked them about that “magnificent desolation” that orbits 240,000 miles away from Earth. Their responses were every bit as credible as they were fascinating. Isn't it unlikely that so many men could tell such a massive lie in such great detail and with flawless delivery?